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The benefits of recycling

Environmental benefits

The recycling industry is making a substantial contribution to the improvement of our environment by cutting greenhouse gas emissions, delivering significant energy and water savings, as well as conserving non-renewable virgin resources.

Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) modelling* has shown that by substituting secondary-use materials for virgin materials in 2006-07 the environmental benefits from reprocessing all material recovered would be equivalent to:

  • Victoria saving more than 81 million gigajoules of energy
  • preventing more than 4.2 million tonnes of greenhouse gases being emitted into the atmosphere (equivalent to taking 690,000 cars off the road)
  • saving 46 thousand megalitres of water (enough to fill more than 18,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools)


Economic benefits

Victoria's reprocessing industries contributed more than $73 million to the state's economy during 2006-07 through capital investment and expenditure on research and development (R&D).

Level of capital investment and expenditure on R&D by Victoria's reprocessing industries, Victoria 2006-07

Investment & expenditure by reprocessing industry

*RMIT University, Centre for Design, Life Cycle Impact Data for Resource Recovery from C&I and C&D Waste in Victoria, September 2005

 


Top | Last updated 18/07/2008

icon - tickAnnual Survey of Recycling Industries

Download Victorian_Recycling_Industries_Annual_Survey_2006-07.pdf Download the Victorian Recycling Industries Annual Survey 2006-07 (552KB)

Victorians recycled a record 62% of the total solid waste stream in 2006-07, and reduced the quantity of waste sent to landfill by almost 4%.

Recovery of material in Victoria for the 2006-07 financial year continued to grow and reached a new high of 6.36 million tonnes, which exceeded material recovered in the last financial year by 4%.

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